Jawbone Up data reveals 2014 South Napa earthquake kept many people up all night

Jawbone has shared the sleeping patterns of some Up wearers directly affected by the 2014 South Napa earthquake that occured on Sunday morning, indicating the power of wearables when used for informational purposes and not just fitness tracking.

On 24 August an earthquake measuring at 6.0 on the moment magnitude scale struck Napa Valley outside of the San Francisco Bay Area. Called the 2014 South Napa earthquake, it caused significant damage, injured roughly 200 people, and is considered the strongest earthquake to hit Northern California in 25 years. In order to fully comprehend how people were negativelt affected by the disaster, Jawbone's data science team has looked at data recorded by Jawbone Up wearers.

Jawbone is a technology company that launched the Up activity tracker in 2011, though it has since released an updated version. Looking at data recorded by people wearing the Up tracker last weekend, Jawbone found that 93 per cent Bay Area residents less than 15 miles from the epicenter woke up suddently at 3:20 am. That's exactly when the earthquake struck.

Jawbone also looked at people farther from the epicenter, in San Francisco and Oakland, and found that only 55 per cent of Up wearers woke up when the earthquake struck. And almost no UP wearers in Modesto and Santa Cruz were woken up by the earthquake, according to Jawbone. But that's not all: data showed that many Up wearers took a long time to go back to sleep, especially in areas closest to the epicenter.

"In fact, 45 per cent of UP wearers less than 15 miles from the epicenter stayed up the rest of the night," explained Jawbone in a blog post published on 25 August. "This study was based on thousands of UP wearers in the Bay Area who track their sleep using UP by Jawbone. All results are statistically significant. All data is anonymized and presented in aggregate."